Requirements
Instructional Barriers – Materials
This can be a really easy place to start addressing universal design to make your class or environment more flexible, especially with good uses of technology that may be available. Rose & Meyer (2002) spend a good portion of their book on flexible instructional media. They compare traditional instructional media – speech (i.e. lecture), text and images (if we're lucky to get pictures) – to the potential flexible instructional media that technology affords today. Much of their treatment focuses on brain research – which is dead-on and we recommend you read their text for a detailed explanation.
Instead of repeating from their text, we'll push this idea further in this tutorial. An entire discipline exists that studies the design of learning materials and learning environments – instructional design (or educational technology). So we're going to pull from that foundation to broaden our understanding of instructional barriers and what we can do about them.
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